Did he imagine it or did another, stronger breath of air stir against his cheek. A great bat?
Down on hands and knees again and slowly up the slide. What to do when slide meets roof? For here in fact slide did meet roof and he crouched in the angle, cleaving against the roof like a bat. He turned off the light. It was only after a minute or so that he realized that it was not quite dark. Rather was it ordinary dark, not the blind black retinal dark of the cave. A breath of air stirred his hair.
Turning his head as slowly as a sick man greeting a visitor, he saw a shadow on the rock. It was only a shadow, he thought. But consider that my flashlight is turned off. It follows then that the shadow has been made by another source of light. As he crawled along the cave a light breeze sprang up, and by the time he reached the shadow, he could smell leaves and bitter bark and the smell of lichened rock warming in sunlight.
But when he turned, he saw, not sunlight but a lattice of vines which all but sealed a hole in the rock. The hole was square.
Well then, he said, and noticed that he was not excited about his deliverance from the cave.
Then there must be more than one opening in the ridge. But why the square hole? Perhaps this was the actual escape hatch for the Confederate moles. Even fat Confederates could use this hole.
Carefully inching his way to the light, he discovered that the opening was not more than a foot and a half square and head high, the head, that is, of a man on all fours. The square shape came not from the rock but from a wooden frame beyond the rock.
A rigor seized him and he shook like a leaf. His teeth chattered. Somewhere above the racket he was thinking that it would be a curious experience to emerge from the cave as a Confederate years later, like a Japanese holdout in the Philippines. Hey you in the Mercedes, who won the war?
Resting elbows on the sill, he meant to poke his head through for a look, but both vines and sill were rotten and he fell, thinking even as he fell that it couldn’t be much of a fall, what with the vines and the ridge itself not being much higher than a man. But this was a fall through air not vines or bushes, through air and color, brilliant greens and violet and vermilion and a blue unlike any sky, a free-fall headfirst with time enough to wonder if he might not be dead after all, what with this tacky heaven and the great black beast of the apocalypse roaring down at him, eyes red, jaws open and ravening, when, wood splintering first then exploding into kindling, he hit the table, then concrete, but not too hard, with one shoulder mostly but with the back of his head some. He shut down, turned off like a light.
3
Something was trying to get into his mouth. He clenched his teeth.
“You were asking for water.”
He opened his eyes. Something, someone, a person, a woman, a girl, bent over him with a paper cup.
“Okay.”
He tried to raise his head to drink properly. It was impossible. Pains shot up his neck. Very well. He had broken his neck. He opened his mouth and she poured water into it. There are few joys greater than drinking cool water after a serious thirst.
The colors came from a stained-glass window set in a roof of clear glass. I’m in church.
“How did you find me and get me in here?”
“I didn’t. You fell in.”
“Fell in? From where?”
“There.” She lifted her face.
In the peak of the gambrel roof, where the vent of an attic might be, a square window had been set in the wall against the ridge. He looked at it.
“How did I get up here on this table or bed or—”
“I got you up with my block-and-tackle.”
“I see.”
“How do you feel?”
“Bad.”
“What hurts?”
“Everything, from my leg to my head. I think my leg is broken.” If my leg hurts, he thought, I am probably not paralyzed.
“Take these three aspirin and go to sleep.”
“Don’t call anyone until I tell you.”
“All right.”
He took the three aspirin and went to sleep.
When he woke, she fed him a large bowl of oatmeal. Why had he never noticed how good oatmeal is?
“What were you doing? Where did you come from?” she asked after a while.
“The cave,” he said absently. He had been looking at the framed hole in the roof peak a long time. “Do you feel anything?” he asked her.
“Yes, a breeze. I had not felt it before. Where does it come from?”
“From the cave.”
“What’s it for?” she asked.
“To keep the greenhouse warm in winter and cool in summer. How does it feel to you?”
“Cool. But did you notice my—”
“Yes, because it’s still warm out.”
“No, it’s cold outside.”
“I judge the cave air is about sixty degrees. It is said to come from air blowing up the gorge and into the cave mouth and across some hot springs.”
“Yes, but did you notice that it is warmer than that in here?”
“Yes,” he said absently. “Can you imagine that vent being there all along and you not noticing it?”
She nodded. “It is both revealing and appealing to me that you cleaned out the vines so my window could catch the breeze from the cave.”
“What old Judge Kemp did,” he said more to himself than to her yet watching her closely, “was to back this greenhouse against the vent in the ridge so he could keep it a steady sixty winter and summer.”
“So the natural air-condition was for fruition.”
“Yes,” he said, closing his eyes. “He made a lot of money. It’s warm in here, warmer than the cave. Hm.”
“I know,” she said. “Did you notice a novelty hereabouts?”
“A novelty?” He opened his eyes and followed her gaze.
There, fitted snugly under the raised sashes of the partition, squatted the huge old kitchen range, no not old but surely new, transformed, reborn. Its polished nickel glittered in the sunlight. Expanses of immaculate white and turquoise enamel glowed like snowy peaks against a blue sky. A fire burned behind amber mica bright as tigers’ eyes.
“You moved it.”
“I moved it.”
“By yourself.”
“By myself. Look, it also has a reservoir.”
“I see.”
“The water is hot.”
“Good.”
“I gave you a bath. To see you was not to believe you.”
“Thank you.”
“But for now, go to sleep. You’re exhausted.”
“Very well. Don’t tell anybody I’m here.”
“Who would I tell?”
Part Two
I
IT WAS NO TROUBLE handling him until he came to and looked at her. She could do anything if nobody watched her. But the moment a pair of eyes focused on her, she was a beetle stuck on a pin, arms and legs beating the air. There was no purchase. It was an impalement and a derailment.
So it had been in school. Alone at her desk she could do anything, solve any problem, answer any question. But let the teacher look over her shoulder or, horror of horrors, stand her up before the class: she shriveled and curled up like paper under a burning glass.
The lieder of Franz Schubert she knew by heart, backwards and forwards, as well as Franz ever knew them. But when four hundred pairs of eyes focused on her, they bored a hole in her forehead and sucked out the words.
When he landed on the floor of her greenhouse, knocking himself out, he was a problem to be solved, like moving the stove. Problems are for solving. Alone. After the first shock of the crash, which caught her on hands and knees cleaning the floor, her only thought had been to make some sense of it, of him, a man lying on her floor smeared head to toe with a whitish grease like a channel swimmer. As her mind cast about for who or what he might be — new kind of runner? masquerader from country-club party? Halloween trick-or-treater? — she realized she did not yet know the new world well enough to know what to be scared of. Maybe the man falling into her house was one of the things that happened, albeit rarely, like a wood duck flying down the chimney.